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Monday, August 25, 2014

Name that Þing

As teenager I switched between the fantasy and science fiction aisle of the local library, but in the end it was science fiction that won me over.

The main difference between the genres seemed the extent to which authors bothered to come up with explanations. The science fiction authors, they bent and broke the laws of Nature but did so consistently, or at least tried to. Fantasy writers on the other hand were just too lazy to work out the rules to begin with.

You could convert Harry Potter into a science fiction novel easily enough. Leaving aside gimmicks such as moving photos that are really yesterday’s future, call the floo network a transmitter, the truth serum a nanobot liquid, and the invisibility cloak a shield. Add some electric buzz, quantum vocabulary, and alien species to it. Make that wooden wand a light saber and that broom an X-wing starfighter, and the rest is a fairly standard story of the Other World, the Secret Clan, and the Chosen One learning the rules of the game and the laws of the trade, of good and evil, of friendship and love.

The one thing that most of the fantasy literature has which science fiction doesn’t have, and which has always fascinated me, is the idea of an Old Language, the idea that there is a true name for every thing and every place, and if you know the true name you have power over it. Speaking in the Old Language always tells the truth. If you speak the Old Language, you make it real.

This idea of the Old Language almost certainly goes back to our ancestor’s fights with an often hostile and unpredictable nature threatening their survival. The names, the stories, the gods and godzillas, they were their way of understanding and managing the environment. They were also the precursor to what would become science. And don’t we in physics today still try to find the true name of some thing so we have power over it?

Aren’t we still looking for the right words and the right language? Aren’t we still looking for the names to speak truth to power, to command that what threatens us and frightens us, to understand where we belong, where we came from, and where we go to?
We call it dark energy and we call it dark matter, but these are not their true names. We call them waves and we call them particles, but these are not their true names. Some call the thing a string, some call it a graph, some call it a bit, but as Lee Smolin put it so nicely, none of these words quite has a “ring of truth” to it. These are not the real names.

Neil Gaiman’s recent fantasy novel “The Ocean at the End of the Road” also draws on the idea of an Old Language, of a truth below the surface, a theory of everything which the average human cannot fathom because they do not speak the right words. In Michael Ende’s “Neverending Story” that what does not have a true name dies and decays to nothing. (And of course Ende has a Chosen One saving the world from that no-thing.) It all starts and it all ends with our ability to name that what we are part of.

You don’t get a universe from nothing of course. You can get a universe from math, but the mathematical universe doesn’t come from nothing either, it comes from Max Tegmark, that is to say some human (for all I can tell) trying to find the right words to describe, well, everything - no point trying to be modest about it. Tegmark, incidentally, also seems to speak at least ten different languages or so, maybe that’s not a coincidence.

The evolution of language has long fascinated historians and neurologists alike. Language is more than assigning a sound to things and things you do with things. Language is a way to organize thought patterns and to classify relations, if in a way that is frequently inconsistent and often confusing. But the oldest language of all is neither Sindarin nor Old Norse, it is, for all we can tell, the language of math in which the universe was written. You can call it temperature anisostropy, or tropospheric ozone precursors, you can call it neurofibrillary tangle or reverse transcriptase, you can call them Bárðarbunga or Eyjafjallajökull - in the end their true names were written in math.

"Tegmark, incidentally, also seems to speak at least ten different languages or so, maybe that’s not a coincidence."

I've personally spoken Swedish, English, and German with Max. I've heard him speak Portuguese, Spanish and French (all three quite well). Since his new wife is from Romania, he's learning Romanian. He also knows some Russian and Mandarin. This list might not be complete.

An especially elegant exposition, Bee. I nominate Cthulhu. Why vote for the lesser evil? The One Name is the tetragrammaton

http://www.angeesee.com/images/YHWH-1.png

which is uncomfortably close to hν. Alas, Hebrew had no written vowels (OK, maybe an "oo"). Build a voder, pronounce it in all possible ways. When one by one the stars go out, that's the boojum. Then again...

These two emerge together but differ in name. The unity is said to be the mystery; Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders.

- Lao Tzu (http://www.taoism.net/ttc/chapters/chap01.htm)

"Since within this mind of enlightenment there is nothing upon which to meditate, this modality transcends all objects of knowledge. Since within this mind of enlightenment there are no distractions, it is the essence of the radiance itself. This Buddha-body of Reality, the uninterrupted union of radiance and emptiness in which the duality of appearance and emptiness is naturally liberated, becomes manifest this way unattained by the structured path to Buddhahood. Though one were to scan the entire external Universe, searching for the nature of mind, one will not find it. Buddhahood can only be attained through the mind."

Mathematics may be older than old school but it's still a structured transformation system, i.e. a language used to convey information and knowledge. As soon as one engages mathematics, or any other structured transformation system, they become the "Tree of Knowledge." To become the "Tree of Life" one must leave all such limitations behind.

That said, I'm currently working on a massive art piece right now called: "Universe: Uni - versa: One - body of words."

Interesting... I don't think I agree that mathematics is necessarily a language to convey information, unless you abuse the words (convey information between t=0 and t=t_1, say). Convey information between whom or what?

Mathematics as a language is special because, unlike all other languagues which refer to things outside itself, maths is entirely self-referential. It just 'is' information by itself, and not necessarily a channel to convey information, though we arguably use it for this purpose.

This is what makes math a good candidate for a 'theory of everything' if you believe that there's no distinction between reality and the mathematical description of reality, ie there's no 'fire' that needs to be blown into equations to 'make them real'. Whether or not that is so is at least presently a question nobody knows how to answer.

Another great fantasy saga (for younger readers) that has "true names" and a powerful underlying magical language is "A Wizard of Earthsea." I don't know whether or not Ursula Le Guin was aware of the analogy to mathematics, but it's a good one.

“This is what makes math a good candidate for a 'theory of everything' if you believe that there's no distinction between reality and the mathematical description of reality, ie there's no 'fire' that needs to be blown into equations to 'make them real'. Whether or not that is so is at least presently a question nobody knows how to answer.”

Hello, my name is Nobody and I am from future. Therefore the answer to the question is obvious. Mathematics is generally a kind of machinery helping to solve problems much more efficiently, sort of “computer” from the pre-computer age. And similar to any other machinery, this one can vary from very advanced to completely broken or deceptive mechanisms (like all those “working” versions of perpetuum mobile or quantum computers today). By the way, I rigorously (mathematically) specify that necessary “fire” of life, which is missing in the ordinary framework, making its structures only unreal and separated “models”, sometimes partially useful, but always fundamentally different from the unified and “breathing” reality. That new mathematics with “fire” is not different from reality (at any level, from now totally causal and unified fundamental physics to biology, consciousness, the humanities and spiritual matters). Time to move from past to future, even in mathematics.

Brings to mind the Clarke story "the nine billion names of God", where finding the true name of God is the purpose of the universe.

Also appropriate that you're writing this after having been in Iceland, whose language is the old language, as far as the Nordic countries and the English speaking world are concerned. Well, minus any magic, sadly.

I remember two sf books in which old and ancient language plays an important role. One is "Dune" by Frank Herbert, a true classic.The other one is "Feersum Endjinn" by Iain M Banks, in which good old English is the "Old Language", and thus is very much fun reading.

Quote: ....Some of the more important Hindu philosophers are atheists, arguing that no sacred religious text such as the Veda could be the word of God, since authorship, even divine authorship, implies the logical possibility of error. Whether believed in or not, a personal God does not figure prominently as the source of the idea of the divine, and instead non-theistic concepts of the divine prevail.

Gary Gutting: What do you mean by “non-theistic” concepts of the divine?

J.G.: One such concept sees the text of the Veda as itself divine. Its language, on this view, has a structure that is prior to and isomorphic with the structure of the world and its grammar is complete (although parts may have been lost over the centuries). The divinity of the text inverts the order of priority between text and author: Now, at best, assignment of authorship is a cataloging device not the identification of origin. Recitation of the text is itself a religious act.

A lot of creative writing lately on this blog. If this is too long I put it up as a note on my facebook.

* * * *

The Sagicorn explored the known worlds as he grew in magic and wisdomAt times the hourglass of his soul in collapsing spin or endless meaningless fallCubes of crystal, his ethereal blood stopped higher time astheir corners held apart yet blocked the Now at its smallest aperture

Not even the SphereFather he overthrew in the former eraphase of dark stars could reverse the hour, tag and mark the bells bywishful intervention, that it made a difference,even given asecret name only former gods remembered

In these times of wingless horns and broken vanished arrows pointing everywhere yetNowhere, as if the steeples on his one lonelyformer world when he was part of the godheadExploring gods and idols in the universe and goat eaten Quinadad

Integrating his quest and life through time his endless beach became a fjord and fjordsHe himself a giant now but a forgotten name carved on stone, a sleeping dwarfCould only dream in packets of themes between the dark or now beyond the starsOf what he had seen

As SphereDream,back when, his brother SphereChrist long vanished,a bottleneck of the changing sea itself,thus the measure of the year, no year zero before or afterward

No SphereGhost, save empty echoes to comfort himno SphereVirgin, fertile mare maid caught in the tidal poolto journey with him

So it came to pass at this point in time he dreamt of the Academy in Far Rock'a'bye,the philosophers gathereddebating the origin of language where this time aroundSagicorn just listened as he had learned to mimic deeplythe songs of sea birds, parrots, and empty wide eyed night owlsSo something gained for himself of their spectrum of intelligence

"They were wrong," he thought as he left the city"There are two ancient languages. The first is the rune-likecarving and names of trees also recorded as numbers Tally-marks storing trades as replete as stored frozen sunlight in the storesof corn so soon again but firewood

The other heated, wet wedges worked on clay and like thenames of former Pharaohs to be broken to fill thecolumns of great cities of the new regimes,these surrounded by clay, a seal if brokenthe truth of commerce could be revealed

Inspired by cycles of the stars a Pharaoh's code and calendar as if god given designyet before the written word and warbler's finer eyesTen thousand years the desert dwellers told of one among the fixed starsthat traveled half the bowl of the canopy of heaven "

Sagicorn so much the lesser god of ice lands and ghostly dreams so seemedback then, a warm volcanic fire in retrospect, he felt sorrowlooking back at the spires of his beloved central city then understood the source of his sorrow.

"It is not that I will find her beyond the darkening skies down the endless beachbeyond, but that I must leave her again..."

For me the best candidate for the "old language" would be that of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. While it's "officially" understood as in a sort of combination of Hebrew and Aramaic, the literal translation is completely ordinary and in fact banal.

Yet the sound of the prayer in its original language is deeply meaningful and in fact very emotional. Since the meaning and the emotion cannot possibly come from the literal meaning as usually translated, it must stem from the language itself.

For me, the Kaddish is the only poem that speaks for itself to all people regardless of their language, and has no need of translation.

Isaac Asimov, used the idea of an old language in Prelude to Foundation, when Hari Seldon encountered the sacred book of the Mycogenians. The book was written both in current galactic language and an archaic language that Hari could not understand.

Ha, Ha, Ha, yes, exactly, it's self-referential, math is I mean; it conveys information between the various time-bound incarnations of itself; it's a structured transformation system. You can also think of it as computing itself, in the sense of the Self-Generating Systems of Ben Goertzel and Harold Bowman (http://www.goertzel.org/books/logic/chapter_seven.htm).

The key point I was making is that, as you suggestively imply, mathematics exists in time. I know Max Tegmark, being an extreme Platonist, doesn't agree but anyone who has experienced the "Clear Light Nature of Mind" will tell you there is no math there; "since within this mind of enlightenment, there is nothing upon which to meditate, this modality transcends ALL objects of knowledge." This is the creatrix - pure, unsoiled consciousness. Mathematical structures exist independent of human minds but they don't exist independent of mind; this is my position. Mathematical structures are emergent; they reveal themselves when all of the pertinent information is properly integrated. This integration occurs due to a motive force - consciousness. I can prove it using the OLD LANGUAGE; the oldest language is no language, it is telepathy (http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00390/full). Read the fascinating comments attached to that above referenced paper, if you will. That would, in a general sense, seem to indicate that mathematical structures convey information to other mathematical structures, Ha, Ha,Ha . . .

My now long series called Sagicorn, a fantasy with sci fi in mind as the issue, and our desire to find what is original maybe beyond cultural experience. (See my blog or fb notes)I found Stephen King in the preface to the third volume of the Gunslinger having a lot to say about would be writers at nineteen on wanting to write something original. Synchronously I found republishing of books by Zane Grey on the Border or Frontiers that had a lot to say in the hopes of recovering the experience of history in the wilderness of the West.Of course recent influences in the popular media and other issues here that are foundational concerns as an inspiration. But I got good reviews from local people I could not imagine long reading all this say at the grocery store which in the end is about all we can expect or need - to find ourselves or connect with others. After awhile writing first draft in real time comes easy. Best

In "Lord of Light", Roger Zelazny's character Sam takes the opposite approach:

"...'Fire' does not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming. The thing that has never happened before is still happening. It is still a miracle. The great burning blossom squats, flowing, upon the limb of the world, excreting the ash of the world, and being none of these things I have named and at the same time all of them, and this is reality — the Nameless.

I charge you — forget the names you bear, forget the words I speak as soon as they are uttered. Look, rather, upon the Nameless within yourselves, which arises as I address it. It hearkens not to my words, but to the reality within me, of which it is part. This is the atman, which hears me rather than my words. All else is unreal. To define is to lose. The essence of all things is the Nameless."

However, I prefer your approach. Another example of it from fiction is Dan Abnett's "enuncia" the primordial language which controls the forces of Chaos in "Ravenor", "Prospero Burns", "Pariah" and other novels.

And of course there was the comic book "Captain Marvel" in which an ordinary boy transforms into super hero by saying the secret word "shazam", with the implication that there is a secret word for each of us, if we could only find it.

Such stories are fun, but partly because they elide the hard work it actually takes to find things out - the work of science.

Perhaps it is worth mentioning the Old and New Testaments:In the beginning God spoke (Word, Greek 'rhea") into existence.Or the word (logos) framing the substance of the world as if logically beyond appearance.

Then there are still silences in this dynamic contrast to consider, nameless ones or a struggle to give names to things as time changes the meaning and memory as if that is all that is left.

The Mourner's Kaddish is in Aramaic, a language closely related to Hebrew, but it's tonal, so the prayer is particularly musical. Aramaic was the language that people, like Jesus if he existed, spoke on the street in Roman era Judea. Modern Hebrew print was adopted from the Aramaic in Roman days. Before then Hebrew writing looked more like Egyptian demotic.

The old language thing often bothers me. I can enjoy, but get annoyed by, stories where all the knowledge is written in an old language in old books or scrolls. When someone goes to some musty old library to dig up some ancient spell, I keep thinking that they should fire up a spell computer made of mystic chips and try the basic four billion spell permutations to find the optimal one to slay the demon or whatnot. The Harry Potter books at least had the idea that magic was something still being invented and improved.

Wheeler used to tell the Parable of the Pebble in which he, as a physicist, argues with a pebble. He tells the pebble that he is going to throw it up in the air and that the pebble was going to return to his hand in 2.4 seconds. The pebble demurs citing free will, but Wheeler insists that the pebble has no choice.

If our universe is comprehensible, that is, can be modeled in a predictive manner, then the language of this model is mathematics. If you have an equation that correctly (*) describes some behavior, real objects have no choice but to obey your commands. Even better, if you manipulate the symbols of the equation in the prescribed manner you can new laws that nature is obliged to obey. It is surprisingly powerful.

(*) You can tell if your model is correct by casting a few spells and seeing if they work.

Godel's incompleteness theory doesn't prevent the language of the universe from being maths. It just puts some limits on what that language can describe. Every linguist learns that context is essential, and, even with context, ambiguity is inevitable, just as Godel's theorem requires that any mathematical system described has at least two models.

The issue is deeper than Godel and involves fundamental ideas of prime numbers.If there is a limit to what math may abstractly describe, an upper one and a lower one, the context is not necessarily ambiguous.After all the uniqueness of Godel's proof depended on the metalanguage as uniqueness by prime numbers.If there is ambiguity as an ultimate possibility such a grounding in proof or disproof and not possible as a unified physics view, this permits the persistence of physical structures that would otherwise vanish or be very rare as we measure things as random precise location among transcendental numbers. Or from an intuitionist approach we can deny such transcendental numbers exist. This dual model trumps the context of Godel's dual models yet raises higher questions of ambiguity than logic as incompleteness.

There's a growing movement in the computer security community towards the use of "object capabilities", which are basically the "true names" of objects that can cause side-effects in a system.

The most common use of object capabilities that I know of is cross-site request forgery protection: somewhere on the admin pages for your blog is a button that says "delete this blog". Also included in that page is the "true name" of the deletion service, a randomly generated string.

An attacker who wants to delete your blog can set up a form on his own page that sends a "delete" message to blogger.com on your behalf. He can disguise it to look like something entirely different. If he can trick you into visiting his page, he can make your browser send a message to blogger.com, and the browser also happily forwards your cookie to authenticate that action. However, because the attacker can't get the true name, the attack fails.

Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla, wrote, "Any time we deviate from OCap, we regret it for both security bug and access-checking overhead reasons." (https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2013-March/029080.html)